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Salvage

Dante

P enny takes off running for the beach, her tail wagging, barking her happy bark.

“Where are you going? Get back here!” I yank the pot off the potbelly stove and chase after her. Getting to the beach, zigging and zagging through the brush, takes me longer now. She’s darted down the old path.

When I catch up to her, she’s barking at the waves.

“Have you got dementia, old girl? They won’t be back for a—” The tender appears on the horizon.

It’s too far away for me to pick out who’s in it other than Haley.

Her hair keeps getting blonder the longer we’re here, and it’s waving in front of her face.

Another second and I realize it’s Sam and Zane too. This can’t be good.

I wade out, ready to take the rope from Zane. Their faces range from stoic to devastated. I have to really focus on holding Haley’s eyes. This is bad. Really bad. I look away to haul on the rope. I get ready to loop it around the big rock, figuring we’re going to need it to go back out soon.

“Don’t tie it off. We need to haul it up. Hide it even better than normal,” Sam says.

“Okay, you going to tell me what the hell is going on?” I’m holding tension, anchoring the tender as best as I can against the waves while Zane helps Haley out.

She’s loaded up with the backpacks they took for the day.

All the supplies are dry, but the three of them are not. “Did you flip out of the tender?”

Haley shakes her head, her hands over her mouth. “Rock Candy is gone. The only thing we found were cut ropes and a life jacket in the cave. WaveRunner’s gone too.”

“Fuck.” My stomach tightens. “Pirates?” I don’t know why I’m asking because of course it was fucking pirates. Calvin and Easton didn’t just take the rotting hull for a joyride. Damn them.

We all knew the beach was a safer place. And yet Calvin had to work all night.

“Let’s get the beach clear and then fill Dante in with the rest we know.” Sam’s already working on the outboard motor.

Zane comes shoulder to shoulder with me, his arms full of the bags. “I’ll help you with that in a second.” He places the bags above the tide line. “Little Bird, why don’t you take Penny back to camp? We’ll be up as soon as we can.”

“Zane, I can help.” Haley picks up all the bags Zane dropped. “I’ll be back for a second load.” Her shoulders are slumped, and her eyes are red. But she’s not crying. Not yet.

“Thank you, Haley.”

“Come on, Penny.”

I ache to go after Haley and pull her into my arms. She’s tough, too tough for her own good. I should know. I’ve pushed my own emotions aside during too many tragedies, but it’s different when you watch someone else do it.

After she disappears into the undergrowth on the way to camp, Zane turns to me as we guide the tender in. He shakes his head no. Like that’s enough of a fucking explanation.

I grunt. I grunt in a very Calvin way. “There’s no fucking way the two of them are dead. They would have figured a way out.”

Sam, being Sam, has the outboard motor all by himself as he sinks into the sand with each step. “It’s possible. But not probable.”

“What the fuck, Sam?” I’ve got the side rope of the tender, and Zane’s got the other half.

It takes us a minute to catch up to him.

When we’ve got the tender positioned to get ready to cover with brush, I tap Sam’s shoulder.

“I said what the fuck. Do you have any evidence that the Viking and Swimmer Boy are dead?”

“No,” he says.

“Well then, that’s what we’re going to go with. If we act like they’re dead, it will crush her. So they’re not dead.”

“What are you, the bloody King of England?” Zane tosses another brown palm frond on the tender.

“No, but I’ll protect Haley’s heart like I’m an emperor. So don’t push me.”

“She’s an adult. Treating her like a child isn’t going to help anything,” Sam says, his hands on his hips. “We need to pull up the fish weir.”

“Fuck we do.” Has he gone completely mad?

“We can’t let them see where we are,” Zane says. He’s on the side of the captain, of course. He’s still got some hero worship going on.

“It’s sticks in the beach. Come on, man. If the pirates have any sense about them, they’re not going to believe that boat got here by itself.” I’m not letting them touch the damn thing. We’ve finally got it perfected so it doesn’t capture too much.

“We’re going to have to move it eventually anyway, Dante.” Zane’s looking over at me with his big brown eyes.

“Stop. Just stop.” I grab both Sam and Zane by their wrists.

Sam’s eyes flick to where I’m touching him, and I let go.

“Fine, just come down here with me.” I march to the beach and turn back to face the jungle.

“We’ve done too much damage. Pulling up the fish weir isn’t going to make this place look wild and untamed.

Look.” The two of them look up at me. The area along the jungle’s edge is trampled.

It’s going to take years for it to appear the way it did before we came here.

The dead fronds on top of the tender look like a pile of dead fronds covering something.

There’s nothing natural about it. “Sure, if someone just glances over, maybe they wouldn’t notice anything, but if they have half a brain cell, they’ll figure it out.

Pulling up the fish weir—how we get most of our food—means we’ve got half a brain cell. ”

Sam shook his head. “Damn. Can’t you just follow orders?”

“Not when they’re fucking stupid.” I turn to Zane, who is looking at where the jungle hits the beach.

“He’s right, Captain. There’s no amount of smoothing down the sand that’s going to make someone think there isn’t a herd of zebras living in the jungle.” Only he said it the fucked up British way.

Sam blows out his breath and shakes his head. “Fine. We’ll need to prepare in other ways, then.”

“That’s a jolly good idea.”

I have to bite my tongue not to say, “Why don’t you just suck his cock then, too?” Instead, I just nod and head into the jungle. I’m not sure what I expect Sassy to be doing when I get to camp, but brushing Penny isn’t it.

The dog hates being brushed, but she’s looking up at Haley like she knows she’s in pain.

“Hey, Sassy.” I loop my arm around her waist, and she glances up at me. Her eyes are more than red now. There are tears on the edges of her lashes. “Tell me everything.” I’m pretty sure that I know everything, but I know her telling me will help her work through it.

“It was just gone.”

Zane and Sam are behind us now. The way Sam has his shoulders arched, he wants to say something. I put my hand up to keep him from cutting her off. If need be, I’ll go Viking on him. But he’s smart enough to stop.

“We swam around, looking for anything that might tell us... well, anything. But we didn’t see anything. Then I swam to the cave. Where I found the extra life vest. But no WaveRunner.”

“Oh, right. Little Bird, you were going to show me what type of knots the vest was tied up with.”

“Yes, I’m not great at knots. But I can try.

” Sassy grabs a piece of rope from the edge of the basket next to the ladder.

“This should work.” She tries for a few minutes.

“Or not. I don’t know my knots. This is so frustrating.

” She pulls on both ends of the strand, pulling it into a perfect square knot.

“Wait, this is one of them. The third one. There’s no way I’ll be able to remember the others. ”

“Here, Sassy, why don’t they make knots and you tell us if they look like the right ones?”

“Sure, that would be good.” She hands me the rope. Sam and Zane find other strands.

I make a bowline. The hardest part is keeping Pepper from eating the ends as I wind it around. “How about this one?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sassy says.

“How about this one?” Sam hands her one. His hand rests on her knee. She rubs her fingers over his.

“Maybe that might be the last one. It was a little more complex to take off.”

“This is a sheet bend.”

“This is good, Little Bird. There’s no way Calvin put the WaveRider away at night. Not when Easton was there. And there’s no way that Easton could know a sheet bend knot. Which means Calvin was in the cave after the pirates took the yacht.”

Fuck me. I don’t want to bring it up, but Sam’s right, we shouldn’t treat Haley like a child.

“Easton did grow up on the water in Maine, and then they did have a small motor boat off the dock in Miami.” And the second the words come out of my mouth, I want to pull them back in.

Her shoulders slump. “Let’s figure out the last knot. ”

My fingers are cramping when I give her a fourth knot. Sam and Zane are trying all kinds of knots as well. And we’re all getting, “No, that’s not it.”

Finally, Sam hands her a knot that I’ve never seen.

“That’s it!” Haley stands up, and Pepper dashes under the kitchen counter.

“That’s a Zeppelin Bend. No way in the world Easton would know it,” Sam says.

“Agreed.” Zane tosses his rope into the basket and heads up the ladder to the sleeping platform.

“This is fantastic!” Haley’s blue eyes light up. “We should go looking for them, like now. What if they’re hurt?”

Sam flicks his eyes at me. Fucking coward.

“I know you want to charge off, Sassy, but we need to be smart. They didn’t come back here with the WaveRunner, which means either the pirates are after them or they think that the pirates might come after them.

” I put my hand on her knee. “Either way, we need a plan.”

“We know this island better than the pirates. We can move around faster than they can,” Zane says. He has the gun box under his arm as he comes down the ladder.

“We think we know this island better than them. But there were paths here when we got here. At first, we thought they were boar and goat paths, but we’ve only seen two boars. The paths could have been made by people.” Haley’s playing with a rope.

Zane nods. “Maybe, Little Bird. But I trust Calvin’s tracking abilities. He said there hadn’t been anyone on the island, not for a long time. Whoever wrecked the derelict might have started the paths, and the boars kept them up.”

“The fact is that we know this side of the island really well, Sassy. And we need to set things up to our advantage.” I lean over, tuck a loose tendril behind her ear, and kiss her cheek.

“Getting all of us captured won’t help anyone.” Sam kisses her other cheek.

“We get things ready here, and then we go looking for them.” Zane places the gun box on the kitchen block counter.

I nod. But I can’t think of a worse idea than us going looking for an Olympic swimmer and a Viking mountain man. Swimming back to port might be a worse idea, but just barely. I smile at Sassy. “Come on. Let’s see what Ewok tricks Zane wants us to build.”

Her forehead furrows.

Zane laughs. “We still have a saw and an axe, and I’m feeling a little crafty. I always love the one where the two logs swung together and crushed the storm troopers. Oh, Little Bird, tell me you’ve seen Return of the Jedi?”

She shakes her head. “Well, as soon as I’m done with Marvel, I will have to move over to Star Wars.”

“First, we have some work to do,” Sam says.